Taking Back the Vote: Florida Fiasco Puts Radical Reforms on the Table

By ALISON SOLOMONPublished November 22nd 2000 in Village Voice

"Every vote counts!" the demonstrators chant, over and over, at rallies
from New York to Fresno, from Anchorage to Tallahassee, as they protest
the electoral debacle that was the November 7 election. Such entreaties
from mainstream citizens-broadcast to thousands, even millions, through
a flurry of e-mails-have turned the Florida fiasco into a public debate
on the depth of American democracy.

"On TV I saw a group of elderly Jewish women in Florida upset to
realize that they'd mistakenly voted for Buchanan," said Christopher
Costa, a newly minted political activist, as he joined the throngs at
Times Square on Saturday. "Then the pundits came on and made fun of
those women. I was so offended that I organized another demonstration
for Monday. You can't have democracy if you don't trust the people."

The outpouring of decentralized, nonpartisan action signals a new
opening for reforms to a system, voting-rights advocates say, that has
flaws far beyond flighty butterfly ballots and antediluvian
apparatuses. Even with a modern, standardized method of casting and
counting votes, and even if violations-such as Black voters allegedly
being turned away from the polls-were eliminated, "our system still
wouldn't fully be serving democracy," says Eric Olson, deputy director
of the Center for Voting and Democracy, a national, nonpartisan
organization pressing for an array of alternatives, including instant
runoff voting, proportional representation, and cumulative voting.

Until recently, such ideas have been relegated to political purgatory.
During the uproar over her 1993 nomination to be assistant attorney
general for civil rights, for instance, legal scholar and activist Lani
Guinier was lambasted for having written articles arguing that such
reforms would more fully enfranchise African Americans and other
minorities. But now that the every-vote-counts myth has been blown
open, "everything can be on the table," Guinier says. "Hope is on the
way when whites in this country begin to realize that they are also
disenfranchised and start examining more closely the experience of
Blacks, Latinos, and other people of color to see how these problems,
which often converge around visible minorities, actually affect us all."

Even Congress is starting to wake up. New York representative Jerrold
Nadler said last week that he will introduce legislation to create a
commission to look into making registration and voting easier; Senator
Charles Schumer promised a bill to fund studies of online voting and
expanded polling hours, not to mention updated equipment. And most
far-reaching, last Tuesday, Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat
from Oregon, and Representative Jim Leach, a Republican from Iowa,
introduced the "Federal Elections Review Commission Act," which calls
for a nonpartisan 12-member commission to contemplate a full range of
reforms. These run the gamut, from opening presidential debates to more
candidates to reconsidering the electoral college, in order to "ensure
the integrity of, and public confidence in, Federal elections."

In a section on "impact on voter turnout and expanding political
dialog," the DeFazio-Leach bill nods to progressives by including two
particular alternatives, the very devices deemed beyond the pale when
Guinier championed them: cumulative voting and proportional
representation. The first of these, cumulative voting (CV), gives
voters as many votes as there are seats up for election to distribute
as they choose. If, say, there are seven seats on a district school
board, a voter may give all seven to one candidate, one to each of
seven candidates, or three to one and two each to two others, and so on.

Proponents argue that cumulative voting offers the surest way to give
voice to minorities-whether that means African Americans in
white-majority districts, or Republicans in heavily Democratic ones-and
many have proposed promising schemes to apply such systems to U.S.
congressional voting. One plan is to expand congressional districts so
that each will elect three or more representatives, rather than the
existing one, and then let voters use CV to choose them. In addition to
forestalling the incumbent-favoring gerrymandering that upcoming
redistricting is certain to promote, such a format allows for what
Guinier calls "self-districting"-the ability of like-minded voters to
pool their power by concentrating their votes on a favored candidate. A
significant minority of, say, passionate Green Party voters might be
too small to elect a representative under the method in place today,
but could win a seat under CV by spending all their chits on the Green
candidate.

That's exactly the system Illinois used from 1870 to 1980, and that
some politicos there are pushing to revive-and with good chances of
success, says Dan Johnson-Weinberger, the Chicago-based national field
director for the Center for Voting and Democracy. "By helping to elect
Republicans from the cities and Democrats from the suburbs or rural
areas, CV kept those parts of the state from always being pitted
against each other. That meant that Illinois could move on such things
as public transportation for downtown Chicago as well as the suburbs.
Government was much more responsive and a lot less corrupt," he notes,
adding that Illinois voters threw out the system only because its
abolition was part of a popular cut-back amendment in the inflationary
year of 1980, which reduced the size of the State House from 177
members to 118. "Classic baby-with-the-bathwater situation," he says.

The other oft-recommended progressive reform, common to parliamentary
systems around the world, is proportional representation (PR), which
allocates seats to parties based on their proportion of the total vote.
New York's own City Council was never so diverse as during its decade
under this system. In 1936 New Yorkers voted by a margin of almost
two-to-one to replace the Tammany Hall-dominated Board of Aldermen
(where Democrats captured 95.3 percent of the seats with only 66.5
percent of the popular vote) with a City Council elected according to
PR. That's what brought the first African American, Adam Clayton
Powell, into New York office, as well as the first Labor and Communist
representatives. At the same time, insurgent Democrats defeated machine
candidates, against whom they formerly hadn't had a prayer.

The machine launched a virulent campaign against PR, using alarmist,
red-baiting claims of foreign powers overthrowing democracy to stir the
public into reverting to the old style of voting in 1947. The result
was a full return to machine control, with the old Dems winning 96
percent of the seats. The Center for Voting and Democracy's Olson
expects to see such models resurface in New York as voting-rights
advocates gear up for the first post-Florida municipal elections next
year.

The core principle guiding all these systems is a rejection of the
winner-take-all approach to representative democracy. Giving all the
power to the victor, no matter how slim the margin of victory, and
silencing the loser, not only makes a mockery of democratic principles
that are based on minority protections, advocates say, but also skews
the campaign process by encouraging candidates to focus on small
slivers of swing voters. Thus such bizarre spectacles as Hillary
Clinton staking out positions on Israel to the right of that country's
own government, and Al Gore neglecting to mention gun control in his
bid for support in Wisconsin or Colorado. The most flagrant symptom of
winner-take-all damage is the supercilious neglect of most of the
states in the presidential campaign as candidates pour all their time
and resources into the states where neither candidate has a significant
lead.

That, of course-along with Gore's apparent triumph in the popular
vote-has opened the op-ed pages and Sunday-morning pundit parades to
disquisitions about the electoral college. Progressives like Guinier
and Olson agree for the most part that the antiquated, lopsided body
needs profound reform, if not downright abolition, but, they warn,
moving to a direct election of the president will not go far enough to
redress the inequities in the system. At least for the moment, notes
Ronald Walters, professor of government and politics at the University
of Maryland, the electoral college's allowance for small states to have
influence, "also ironically allows for the impact of cohesive
minorities, like Black Americans. Because Blacks voted 90 percent for
one candidate in this election, we had impact on the states, and thus
on the electoral vote."

In some states, at least. The thin blue line snaking along the
Mississippi delta amid a sea of Republican red on the voting-result
maps demonstrates how meaningless even some concentrated votes are
under winner-takes-all. Despite those 90 percent of African American
votes being cast for Gore, the Southern states all went to Bush.

Senator-elect Hillary Clinton's instant promises notwithstanding, the
electoral college is not likely to go anywhere soon, Walters contends.
"Changing it takes a two-thirds majority, and the ones with more seats
are the ones benefiting from it. How can anyone imagine that it's going
to change?"

Some of its distortions, though, could be mitigated. One of the most
promising ways-and the one getting the biggest push around the
country-is instant runoff voting (IRV). On Election Day, voters in
Oakland approved a charter amendment to use this technique in special
elections to fill vacancies on their city council, and in nearby San
Leandro, voters adopted a city charter amendment to use runoff
elections for theirs. Meanwhile, New Mexico, Alaska, and Vermont have
been seriously considering the mechanism for their statewide offices.

Under IRV-long in use in national elections in Australia and
Ireland-instead of simply marking an X next to the most-desired
candidate, voters would rank them according to preference. If no
candidate emerges with a majority after all the first-choice votes are
counted, then the candidates who received the fewest number of 1's are
eliminated. The 2's on those ballots are then distributed among the
remaining candidates until one achieves a majority. If IRV had been in
place two weeks ago, the number-two choices on 96,837 ballots that
favored Ralph Nader in Florida would have been turned over accordingly,
and nobody would have heard of Katherine Harris. What's more, "IRV
would mean that someone was winning a majority," points out
Johnson-Weinberger. "It's not radical or crazy to say that a president
should get one more vote than 50 percent to win. A runoff lets you do
that, while also giving more meaningful participation to third parties,
which can launch all-out campaigns without fear of being labeled
spoilers."

According to five-term Vermont state representative Terry Bouricius, a
member of the Progressive Party, IRV has good chances of passing in his
state, where a bill favoring it will soon be introduced with
tripartisan support. "Established politicians can recognize how it can
benefit them, at least in the short term," he says, "even as in the
long term, it opens up third-party participation."

It's a small step, though, he says, in a country where voter turnout
hovers at the halfway mark, and is lowest among the poor and
uneducated. "Proportional representation can have far more impact in
serving to include many more voices in our democracy, but it's a long
battle. IRV is something I think we can pass in a year or two, and that
will help us move to even better reforms, as it makes room for more
parties."

If such a battle will be joined, however, it will take massive
grassroots, multiracial efforts. "Right now the slogan in Florida is
'Let Granny Vote,' " says Ron Walters, "because, the feeling is, if
granny's vote counts, our votes may be counted, too. That's why Jesse
Jackson has been down there speaking in synagogues and holding hands
with rabbis. What we don't know now is how long that coalition can stay
mobilized."